"We can't stop here, this is bat country!"
— Hunter S. Thompson

"Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas ... with the music at top volume and at least a pint of ether."
— Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas)

"I was not proud of what I had learned but I never doubted that it was worth knowing."
— Hunter S. Thompson (The Rum Diary: A Novel)

"In a nation run by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: not necessarily to win, but mainly to keep from losing completely."
— Hunter S. Thompson

"Demolish the bridges behind you; then there is no choice but to move forward."
— Firdtjof Nansen

"Ours is a system of corporate socialism, where companies capitalize their profits and socialize their losses…in effect, they tax you for their accidents, bungling, boondoggles, and mismanagement, just like a government. We should be able to deselect them. "
— Ralph Nader

"We shouldn't be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas."
— Noam Chomsky

"Like all dreamers I confuse disenchantment with truth."
— Jean-Paul Sartre

"There are no facts, only interpretations."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead. "
— Charles Bukowski

"My ambition is handicapped by laziness"
— Charles Bukowski (Factotum)

"Sex is kicking death in the ass while singing."
— Charles Bukowski

"The trouble with a mask is it never changes"
— Charles Bukowski

"purple does something strange to me"
— Charles Bukowski (The People Look Like Flowers At Last: New Poems)

"Music, feelings of happiness, mythology, faces worn by time, certain twilights and certain places, want to tell us something, or they told us something that we should not have missed, or they are about to tell us something; this imminence of a revelation that is not produced is, perhaps, 'the aesthetic event'."
— Jorge Luis Borges

""When you reach my age, you realize you couldn't have done things very much better or much worse than you did them in the first place.""
— Jorge Luis Borges

"We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning."
— Jean Baudrillard (Simulacra and Simulation)

"the neighborhood is nothing but a protective zone- remodeling, disinfection, a snobbish and hygenic design- but above all in a figurative sense: it is a machine for making emptiness."
— Jean Baudrillard (Simulacra and Simulation)

"Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.
"
— Jean Baudrillard

"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."
— Carl Sagan

"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe."
— Carl Sagan

"Frederick Douglas taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom, but reading is still the path. "
— Carl Sagan

"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."
— Frederick Douglass

"The soul that is within me no man can degrade."
— Frederick Douglass

"The crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose. Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences which far exceed whatever good might result? When will our moralists give us an answer to this question?" "
— John Hersey (Hiroshima)

"The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear."
— Richard Dawkins

"To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and 'improved' by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries"
— Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion)

"We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realize that we are apes."
— Richard Dawkins

"The chicken is only an egg’s way for making another egg."
— Richard Dawkins

"That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence."
— Christopher Hitchens

"“In order to rally people, governments need enemies. They want us to be afraid, to hate, so we will rally behind them. And if they do not have a real enemy, they will invent one in order to mobilize us.”"
— Tich Nhat Hahn

"Around us, life bursts with miracles--a glass of water, a ray of sunshine, a leaf, a caterpillar, a flower, laughter, raindrops. If you live in awareness, it is easy to see miracles everywhere. Each human being is a multiplicity of miracles. Eyes that see thousands of colors, shapes, and forms; ears that hear a bee flying or a thunderclap; a brain that ponders a speck of dust as easily as the entire cosmos; a heart that beats in rhythm with the heartbeat of all beings. When we are tired and feel discouraged by life's daily struggles, we may not notice these miracles, but they are always there. "
— Thich Nhat Hahn

"When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world."
— John Muir

"The mountains are calling and I must go."
— John Muir

"Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity..."
— John Muir

"I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing that I wanted to do."
— Georgia O'Keeffe

"Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional."
— Haruki Murakami

"Whatever it is you're seeking won't come in the form you're expecting."
— Haruki Murakami

"Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them."
— Marcus Aurelius

"Our life is what our thoughts make it."
— Marcus Aurelius

"When you arise in the morning think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love ..."
— Marcus Aurelius

"Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one."
— Marcus Aurelius

"If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment."
— Marcus Aurelius

"Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together,but do so with all your heart."
— Marcus Aurelius

"How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it."
— Marcus Aurelius

"Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth."
— Marcus Aurelius

"Time is the most valuable thing that a man can spend."
— Diogenes Laërtius

"One day a man invited him into a richly furnished house, saying 'be careful not to spit on the floor.' Diogenes, who needed to spit, spat in his face, exclaiming that it was the only dirty place he could find where spitting was permitted."
— Diogenes Laërtius (The Lives And Opinions Of Eminent Philosophers)